The Illustrated Man (17 page)

The crowd had drifted about, was mingling with the Martians like a carnival throng. Everywhere was the buzzing murmur of people fingering the rockets, asking questions.

Ettil was cold. He was beginning to tremble even more now. “Don’t you feel it?” he whispered. “The tenseness, the evilness of all this. Something’s going to happen to us. They have some plan. Something subtle and horrible. They’re going to do something to us—I know.”

“I say kill every one of them!”

“How can you kill people who call you ‘pal’ and ‘buddy’?” asked another Martian.

Ettil shook his head. “They’re sincere. And yet I feel as if we were in a big acid vat melting away, away. I’m frightened.” He put his mind out to touch among the crowd. “Yes, they’re really friendly, hail-fellows-well-met (one of their terms). One huge mass of common men, loving dogs and cats and Martians equally. And yet—and yet——”

The band played “Roll Out the Barrel.” Free beer was being distributed through the courtesy of Hagenback Beer, Fresno, California.

The sickness came.

The men poured out fountains of slush from their mouths. The sound of sickness filled the land.

Gagging, Ettil sat beneath a sycamore tree. “A plot, a plot—a horrible plot,” he groaned, holding his stomach.

“What did you eat?” The assignor stood over him.

“Something that they called popcorn,” groaned Ettil.

“And?”

“And some sort of long meat on a bun, and some yellow liquid in an iced vat, and some sort of fish and something called pastrami,” sighed Ettil, eyelids flickering.

The moans of the Martian invaders sounded all about.

“Kill the plotting snakes!” somebody cried weakly.

“Hold on,” said the assignor. “It’s merely hospitality. They overdid it. Up on your feet now, men. Into the town. We’ve got to place small garrisons of men about to make sure all is well. Other ships are landing in other cities. We’ve our job to do here.”

The men gained their feet and stood blinking stupidly about.

“Forward, march!”

One, two, three, 
four! 
One, two, three, 
four!
 . . .

The white stores of the little town lay dreaming in shimmering heat. Heat emanated from everything—poles, concrete, metal, awnings, roofs, tar paper—everything.

The sound of Martian feet sounded on the asphalt.

“Careful, men!” whispered the assignor. They walked past a beauty shop.

From inside, a furtive giggle. “Look!”

A coppery head bobbed and vanished like a doll in the window. A blue eye glinted and winked at a keyhole.

“It’s a plot,” whispered Ettil. “A plot, I tell you!”

The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red. Fans were whirring, the perfumed wind issuing upon the stillness, moving among green trees, creeping among the amazed Martians.

“For God’s sake!” screamed Ettil, his nerves suddenly breaking loose. “Let’s get in our rockets—go home! They’ll get us! Those horrid things in there. See them? Those evil undersea things, those women in their cool little caverns of artificial rock!”

“Shut up!”

Look at them in there, he thought, drifting their dresses like cool green gills over their pillar legs. He shouted.

“Someone shut his mouth!”

“They’ll rush out on us, hurling chocolate boxes and copies of 
Kleig Love
 and 
Holly Pick-ture,
 shrieking with their red greasy mouths! Inundate us with banality, destroy our sensibilities! Look at them, being electrocuted by devices, their voices like hums and chants and murmurs! Do you dare go in there?”

“Why not?” asked the other Martians.

“They’ll fry you, bleach you, change you! Crack you, flake you away until you’re nothing but a husband, a working man, the one with the money who pays so they can come sit in there devouring their evil chocolates! Do you think you could control them?”

“Yes, by the gods!”

From a distance a voice drifted, a high and shrill voice, a woman’s voice saying, “Ain’t that middle one there cute?”

“Martians ain’t so bad after all. Gee, they’re just men,” said another, fading.

“Hey, there. 
Yoo-hoo!
 Martians! Hey!”

Yelling, Ettil ran. . . .

He sat in a park and trembled steadily. He remembered what he had seen. Looking up at the dark night sky, he felt so far from home, so deserted. Even now, as he sat among the still trees, in the distance he could see Martian warriors walking the streets with the Earth women, vanishing into the phantom darknesses of the little emotion palaces to hear the ghastly sounds of white things moving on gray screens, with little frizz-haired women beside them, wads of gelatinous gum working in their jaws, other wads under the seats, hardening with the fossil imprints of the women’s tiny cat teeth forever imbedded therein. The cave of winds—the cinema.

“Hello.”

He jerked his head in terror.

A woman sat on the bench beside him, chewing gum lazily. “Don’t run off; I don’t bite,” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

“Like to go to the pictures?” she said.

“No.”

“Aw, come on,” she said. “Everybody else is.”

“No,” he said. “Is that all you do in this world?”

“All? Ain’t that enough?” Her blue eyes widened suspiciously. “What you want me to do—sit home, read a book? Ha, ha! That’s rich.”

Ettil stared at her a moment before asking a question.

“Do you do anything else?” he asked.

“Ride in cars. You got a car? You oughta get you a big new convertible Podler Six. Gee, they’re fancy! Any man with a Podler Six can go out with any gal, you bet!” she said, blinking at him. “I bet you got all kinds of money—you come from Mars and all. I bet if you really wanted you could get a Podler Six and travel everywhere.”

“To the show maybe?”

“What’s wrong with ‘at?”

“Nothing—nothing.”

“You know what you talk like, mister?” she said. “A Communist! Yes, sir, that’s the kinda talk nobody stands for, by gosh. Nothing wrong with our little old system. We was good enough to let you Martians invade, and we never raised even our bitty finger, did we?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to understand,” said Ettil. “Why did you let us?”

“’Cause we’re bighearted, mister; that’s why! Just remember that, bighearted.” She walked off to look for someone else.

Gathering courage to himself, Ettil began to write a letter to his wife, moving the pen carefully over the paper on his knee.

“Dear Tylla——”

But again he was interrupted. A small-little-girl-of-an-old-woman, with a pale round wrinkled little face, shook her tambourine in front of his nose, forcing him to glance up.

“Brother,” she cried, eyes blazing. “Have you been saved?”

“Am I in danger?” Ettil dropped his pen, jumping.

“Terrible danger!” she wailed, clanking her tambourine, gazing at the sky. “You need to be saved, brother, in the worst way!”

“I’m inclined to agree,” he said, trembling.

“We saved lots already today. I saved three myself, of you Mars people. Ain’t that nice?” She grinned at him.

“I guess so.”

She was acutely suspicious. She leaned forward with her secret whisper. “Brother,” she wanted to know, “you been baptized?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered back.

“You don’t know?” she cried, flinging up hand and tambourine.

“Is it like being shot?” he asked.

“Brother,” she said, “you are in a bad and sinful condition. I blame it on your ignorant bringing up. I bet those schools on Mars are terrible—don’t teach you no truth at all. Just a pack of made-up lies. Brother, you got to be baptized if you want to be happy.”

“Will it make me happy even in this world here?” he said. “Don’t ask for everything on your platter,” she said. “Be satisfied with a wrinkled pea, for there’s another world we’re all going to that’s better than this one.”

“I know that world,” he said.

“It’s peaceful,” she said.

“Yes.”

“There’s quiet,” she said.

“Yes.”

“There’s milk and honey flowing.”

“Why, yes,” he said.

“And everybody’s laughing.”

“I can see it now,” he said.

“A better world,” she said.

“Far better,” he said. “Yes, Mars is a great planet.”

“Mister,” she said, tightening up and almost flinging the tambourine in his face, “you been joking with me?”

“Why, no.” He was embarrassed and bewildered. “I thought you were talking about——”

“Not about mean old nasty Mars, I tell you, mister! It’s your type that is going to boil for years, and suffer and break out in black pimples and be tortured——”

“I must admit Earth isn’t very nice. You’ve described it beautifully.”

“Mister, you’re funning me again!” she cried angrily.

“No, no—please. I plead ignorance.”

“Well,” she said, “you’re a heathen, and heathens are improper. Here’s a paper. Come to this address tomorrow night and be baptized and be happy. We shouts and we stomps and we talk in voices, so if you want to hear our all-cornet, all-brass band, you come, won’t you now?”

“I’ll try,” he said hesitantly.

Down the street she went, patting her tambourine, singing at the top of her voice, “Happy Am I, I’m Always Happy.”

Dazed, Ettil returned to his letter.

“Dear Tylla: To think that in my naïveté I imagined that the Earthmen would have to counterattack with guns and bombs. No, no. I was sadly wrong. There is no Rick or Mick or Jick or Bannon—those lever fellows who save worlds. No.

“There are blond robots with pink rubber bodies, real, but somehow unreal, alive but somehow automatic in all responses, living in caves all of their lives. Their 
derrières
 are incredible in girth. Their eyes are fixed and motionless from an endless time of staring at picture screens. The only muscles they have occur in their jaws from their ceaseless chewing of gum.

“And it is not only these, my dear Tylla, but the entire civilization into which we have been dropped like a shovelful of seeds into a large concrete mixer. Nothing of us will survive. We will be killed not by the gun but by the glad-hand. We will be destroyed not by the rocket but by the automobile . . .”

Somebody screamed. A crash, another crash. Silence.

Ettil leaped up from his letter. Outside, on the street two ears had crashed. One full of Martians, another with Earthmen. Ettil returned to his letter:

“Dear, dear Tylla, a few statistics if you will allow. Forty-five thousand people killed every year on this continent of America; made into jelly right in the can, as it were, in the automobiles. Red blood jelly, with white marrow bones like sudden thoughts, ridiculous horror thoughts, transfixed in the immutable jelly. The cars roll up in tight neat sardine rolls—all sauce, all silence.

“Blood manure for green buzzing summer flies, all over the highways. Faces made into Halloween masks by sudden stops. Halloween is one of their holidays. I think they worship the automobile on that night—something to do with death, anyway.

“You look out your window and see two people lying atop each other in friendly fashion who, a moment ago, had never met before, dead. I foresee our army mashed, diseased, trapped in cinemas by witches and gum. Sometime in the next day I shall try to escape back to Mars before it is too late.

“Somewhere on Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save the World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.

“The women of this evil planet are drowning us in a tide of banal sentimentality, misplaced romance, and one last fling before the makers of glycerin boil them down for usage. Good night, Tylla. Wish me well, for I shall probably die trying to escape. My love to our child.”

Weeping silently, he folded the letter and reminded himself to mail it later at the rocket post.

He left the park. What was there to do? Escape? But how? Return to the post late tonight, steal one of the rockets alone and go back to Mars? Would it be possible? He shook his head. He was much too confused.

All that he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of a lot of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night. No, no.

He looked at the haunted faces of the Earthmen drifting violently along in their mechanical death boxes. Soon—yes, very soon—they would invent an auto with six silver handles on it!

“Hey, there!”

An auto horn. A large long hearse of a car, black and ominous pulled to the curb. A man leaned out.

“You a Martian?”

“Yes.”

“Just the man I gotta see. Hop in quick—the chance of a lifetime. Hop in. Take you to a real nice joint where we can talk. Come on—don’t stand there.”

As if hypnotized, Ettil opened the door of the car, got in.

They drove off.

“What’ll it be, E.V.? How about a manhattan? Two manhattans, waiter. Okay, E.V. This is my treat. This is on me and Big Studios! Don’t even touch your wallet. Pleased to meet you, E.V. My name’s R. R. Van Plank. Maybe you hearda me? No? Well, shake anyhow.”

Ettil felt his hand massaged and dropped. They were in a dark hole with music and waiters drifting about. Two drinks were set down. It had all happened so swiftly. Now Van Plank, hands crossed on his chest, was surveying his Martian discovery.

“What I want you for, E.V., is this. It’s the most magnanimous idea I ever got in my life. I don’t know how it came to me, just in a flash. I was sitting home tonight and I thought to myself, My God, what a picture it would make!
Invasion of Earth by Mars.
 So what I got to do? I got to find an adviser for the film. So I climbed in my car and found you and here we are. Drink up! Here’s to your health and our future. 
Skoal!”